How To Start An Online Beauty E-Commerce Store: Ultimate Guide

by Munis Khan on June 7th, 2021

How To Start An Online Beauty E-Commerce Store: Ultimate Guide

In this blog, we will explain how easy it is to start an online beauty E-commerce store. We will also be shedding light on the advantages and disadvantages of having one.

Why should you have an ecommerce store for your beauty products?

Before we begin, let us look at some stats.

Source: A blog from Common Thread Collective

In the above stats, dynamic e-commerce growth can be clearly seen in the industry of beauty and personal care in the United States only.

According to statista.com, e-commerce will make up to 22% of global retail sales by 2023.

The size of the global beauty marketing expenditure was $465bn in 2017 and by 2024, it is expected to be $750bn. Asians are the biggest consumers of cosmetic products (41% of the market in 2019). North Americans (24%) and West Europeans (18%) follow. United Kingdom is 10th with a turnover of £ 1.80 billion and a global export market share of 3.6%.

A web development company with extensive experience in creating high performing beauty websites can help here. and maintaining e-commerce stores especially with the cosmetic industry and working with multiple beauty brands such as temptu.com and wardrobesupplies.com for improving their online presence and helping them SELL their products online.

Advantages of having a beauty E-Commerce store

Hassle-free buying process.
Cost saving.
Flexibility for customers.
Easy product and price comparison.
Multiple payment methods.
Due to easy access to the internet, finding a reliable web designing company that will help set up an ecommerce website is no problem these days.
Earn MORE money.
Expand your customer reach and get clients from all over the world.

Disadvantages of having a beauty E-Commerce store

None! Yes! There are no disadvantages of having an online presence. Multiple platforms such as WordPress, Magento, Shopify, KIBO, etc. with a variety of innovative features and hassle-free payment methods have made making a purchase online a lot easier than physically visiting a brick and mortar shop and buying what you want.

A Quick guide for creating your first e-commerce beauty store

Starting an e-commerce store is quite similar to starting a physical store. The only difference is the medium. So, here is a quick step by step guide for creating your first online beauty store:

1. Choose your type/category/niche

The beauty industry has a number of niches you can choose from. So the first thing you can do is research and study thoroughly about the different types of niches and select the one you have the most experience with. Having experience means having knowledge of the field or by working in the same field, or selling or manufacturing the products. Make sure you have a good range of products which are trending and are of great quality and standard.

2. Choose a e-commerce development platform for your website

From amazing features and cool functionalities, these are the recommended e-commerce website development platforms:

I. Magento

Magento is a powerful open-source development platform for e-commerce websites. It has two editions– Community and Enterprise to serve both small and large businesses. In June 2020, Magento 1 was replaced by Magento 2 adding various new features and updates.

Magento currently powers 1.2% of sites on the Internet.
Magento handles more than $100 billion in gross merchandise every year.
Magento CE has 24.8% of the e-commerce market share while Shopify has 9%.
Magento’s global e-commerce sales in 2020 amount to $224 billion.

Magento 2 is one of the most powerful platform as it is able to handle hundreds and thousands of products and orders easily. The limit depends on the size of your server. Some of the benefits & features of Magento 2 include:

Customizable– Magento 2 is a customizable platform, there are no limitations on how you can design your store or add features of your own choice as long as you have a good development team (Tekglide) who understands your requirements.

SEO Friendly– Its builtin SEO features help in optimizing products and images and generate SEO-friendly URLs.

Mobile responsive– Websites created using Magento are compatible with all browsers and screen sizes.

Easy to manage– Once the website is ready it is quite easy to add/remove products and manage orders.

Extensions– 1000’s of extensions having amazing features are available on the magento marketplace for ease of customization.

Other benefits include: Fast loading pages, allows multi websites, supports multiple languages & currencies, third-party integration secure, multiple sales tools and much more.

One of our coolest customization on a magento website include:

Recommend your products according to your customer’s skin type/color/tone with our powerful Magento 2 marketing tool and increase conversions, revenue, and engagement.

Get a quote on magento development

II. Shopify

Shopify is another popular e-commerce platform for creating, managing and maintaining an online store. It has five different pricing plans starting from Shopify Lite which is around $9/month to Shopify Plus which is around $2000/month.

Shopify is mostly preferred for small to medium businesses which have limited resources or budgets. It is the third most famous website development platform:

Shopify has around 20% e-commerce market share.
In 2020, Shopify made over $1.5 billion in sales during Black Friday. This meant 10,978 orders per minute and peak sales volume per minute of $870,000.
87% of merchants use the Shopify App Store and they have 6 apps installed on average. Expectedly, the App Store has generated over $100 million in revenue.
Shopify supports more than 600,000 businesses in about 175 countries.

Shopify is highly flexible and quite easy to use. It has over 100 free and paid themes. It also has many ad-ons which can help you customize your beauty store and increase functionalities. It has an enterprise version as well, known as Shopify Plus (https://www.shopify.com/plus), which allows more customization and has other benefits. Some of the features of Shopify include:

Shopify is simple to use, affordable and customer-friendly.
More than 100 store templates– Shopify’s Theme Store features many amazing free and paid themes for different industries, which you can then customize to suit your branding.
Customization – It has an app store which has more than 1400 apps which can be used to customize your beauty store according to your needs. It also has a lot of checkout and payment options.
24/7 Support– Shopify provides phone support, live chat, and email support.
Hosting– Shopify is a SaaS (software as a service) so you don’t have to worry about things like hosting or maintenance.
Multichannel selling – sell on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and eBay easily.

One of our coolest customization on a shopify website include:

Professional Bannerslider along with a cool sliding mini cart developed by one of our Shopify experts gives our client’s website the visual appeal it deserves.

Get a quote on shopify development

III. WordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source website development and content management platform. There are two different versions– Hosted WordPress(https://wordpress.com/) & Self-hosted WordPress(https://wordpress.org/). Hosted WordPress is a SaaS (software as a service) which means you can host and maintain your website through WordPress only. Self-Hosted WordPress is piece of software that you download from wordpress.org and then install on your own web server.

WordPress powers 39.6% of the internet in 2021, a growth of nearly 5% from 35% in 2020, and a 4% rise from the year before.
64.1% of CMS- built websites are WordPress sites.
Over 400 million people visit WordPress sites each month
Approximately 22 percent of new domain names in the US are run on WordPress
Nearly 20 million websites are powered by WordPress

WordPress plays a very important role in the online business environment. The effectiveness of your website depends on the developer’s and designer’s(Tekglide) creativity. This makes it easier for small businesses to compete with large businesses online. Some of the coolest features include:

WordPress offers over 50,000 plugins and over 3,500 GPL-licensed themes.
Flexibility – With WordPress, you can create any type of website you want: a personal blog or website, a photoblog, a business website, a professional portfolio, a government website, a magazine or news website, an online community, even a network of websites.
Easy to manage content.
Easy installations and updates.

This means that a website built in WordPress is easily customizable and in the hands of the right website developer(Tekglide) it can be used to meet the requirements of any web design project including a cosmetic store.

One of our coolest customization on a wordpress website include:

Surprise your customers with our customizable Free Gifts Plugin for wordpress.

Get a quote on wordpress development

Still confused which platform to choose? Call us(630-310-8384) now and we’ll help you select the most suitable platform for your beauty store.

3. Choose the right domain name.

Make sure your domain name is short, unique, catchy and brandable.

4. Setup your products.

Prepare and setup your products and other details on your website with appropriate details, prices and shipping and payment methods.

5. Develop a successful SEO Strategy.

Try to figure out what keywords your customers would use to search for your products and optimize your web pages using those keywords. Here is a proper guide to a successful SEO:

6. Launch your website.

Publish your website on the internet.

7. Online Marketing

Online or e-commerce marketing is the practice of using marketing tactics to drive traffic to your online beauty store, converting that traffic into paying customers, and retaining those customers post-purchase. Here are some helpful tips on increasing traffic:

SEO(Search Engine Optimization) – It is a technique used to increase the ranking of your website on Search Results. And this can be achieved in many ways.

Start with understanding your consumer market(who will buy your product) and create a strong content and generate relevant keywords accordingly.
Create a sitemap for search engines to ensure the search engines discover new or updated pages of your website.
Use relevant keywords in your URLs, titles and descriptions.
Optimize your images: Use HTML image elements to embed images in your content.
Use robots.txt file to block unwanted crawling. A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.
Create an attractive UI and a fast loading web pages for a great user experience. Here is one of our master piece (temptu.com) with an impeccable UI.
Create mobile-friendly website.
Add live chat to your webstore.

Social Media Marketing – Convert your social media(Instagram/Facebook) followers into website visitors by integrating and connecting your social media(Instagram/Facebook) accounts with your cosmetic website. You can share images and details of your products on thoe accounts and link those products with their respective website URLs. You can also use YouTube to promote your website by adding content videos such as product reviews, tutorials, recommendations, new product announcements etc.

Visit example.com, a website which is integrated with multiple social media accounts.

Email campaigns –

Welcome emails- Send promotional emails on customer registration.
Discount/coupons emails- Send coupon codes to attract more visitors.
Informative emails- Send useful beauty tips by email.
Wish list reminders

Covid 19

By now you must have realized why there are so many benefits of having an e-commerce store in this era and how easy it is to set up an ecommerce beauty store. Regardless, the Covid-19 pandemic has also shown us how important it is for us to have an online presence of your companies/businesses.

According to new data from IBM’s U.S. Retail Index, the pandemic has accelerated the shift away from physical stores to digital shopping by roughly five years.

Apparently, it has become safer to order a product online rather than physically visiting a store and risking exposure to the virus. Due to this, selling products or services online has become convenient, safer and beneficial for entrepreneurs amid the COVID lockdown.